Judith has made more than a dozen documentary films in Africa and Australia with her husband David MacDougall, and more recently, has worked alone with digital video in India and China. She has also taught film and video production courses in the USA, Europe, and China.
When Geraldine Kawangka’s husband died she and her six children moved out of their suburban-style house at Aurukun on Cape York Peninsula. In earlier times their bark house would have been abandoned and burnt to avoid contact with the dead man’s spirit and to allow it to return to its own traditional country. Now, with Western-style housing, this is no…
This is the third film in the Turkana Conversations trilogy: it investigates the views of the Turkana, and especially Turkana women, on marriage and polygyny. As the plans for a marriage in a nearby homestead unfold, the film explores why a Turkana woman would want her husband to take a second (or third) wife, and how the system of polygyny…
The first film in the Turkana Conversations trilogy is a multifaceted portrait of Lorang, the head of the homestead and one of the important senior men of the Turkana. Because they are relatively isolated and self-sufficient, most Turkana (including Lorang’s son) see their way of life continuing unchanged into the future. But Lorang thinks otherwise, for he has seen something…